Saving Hope
by ylime92
Summary: Avengers AU - Steve gets hurt whist on a mission looking for an escaped Emil Blonsky. He's trying to re-create the serum used to create Steve's abilities. It causes a temporary reaction slows his to that of a regular person. He slips into a coma and has an outer body experience, leaving him to watch over his friends, his doctor and those who work and stay in the hospital.


It seemed like the day was on her side as Dr Bethany Alexander stepped into the ER of the New York-Presbyterian Hospital and saw that only eight of the twenty-five beds were occupied. It wasn't that she didn't love being in The Pit, she did, it's where all the action was, where the most spectacular and out-of-nowhere-extraordinary cases come in, like the guy last week who had a rebar sticking out of his chest because he fell of a ladder on a construction site, now that was a fun case. Today, however, she just was not in the mood, she didn't get a chance to eat breakfast, other than the luke-warm cup of coffee she managed to steal off of one of the nurses and a bite of a graham cracker from the doctor's lounge. This added with the fact that she got a surprise wake-up call from her mother announcing that her latest gold-digging efforts was amounting in husband number four was the cherry on top of an already trying morning.

She wandered over to the nurses' station in the center of the ER, sipping her coffee that by this time had already gone cold and tasted a little like Styrofoam. Nurse Cathy was sat behind the desk, organizing discharge papers and entering patients' details into the computer, trying to fill the time between the next admissions. She looked oddly serine from the usual chaos of the ER, _'calm before the storm'_, thought Beth.

"Hey, what are you doing? That doesn't need to be done until the end of the shift?" Beth stated, looking at the pile of files already filling up the desk in front of her friend.

"I know, I'm just not used to not having much to do, so I thought I'd grab a head start, better to do something than nothing I guess" Replied the other woman, placing a strand of strawberry-blonde hair back behind her ear "Just waiting for the call".

"The call? It seems pretty quiet today, doesn't look like anyone's going to call out at the moment" jested Dr Alexander, looking around the sparse ER, eyes casting over the perfectly set up observation divides and beds, not a drop of blood in sight.

"Oh, no…no, no, no. You do _not_; you never, _ever,_ say that in the ER. _Ever_! You jinxed it, whatever comes I next, that's on you my friend!" Cathy's look of disapproval was pronounced by the swing of her pony tail as she shook her head at the doctor standing in front of her.

"what's on who?" said a voice from behind. Beth turned to see the handsome face of Dr Craig O'Reilly, head of the Trauma Unit at NYP. He had a hard-look, probably from all of those years serving with the Army as a medic, and salt and pepper hair, which only made him more appealing, especially to the nurses who saw him as a real-life Dr Doug Ross from the TV show 'ER'.

"Oh, Doctor O'Reilly, before the shit hits the fan, I thought you'd like to know whose fault it's going to be when we're flooded with patients momentarily." Nurse Cathy said, slyly grinning at Beth, "She jinxed us."

"No!" Doctor O'Reilly said in mock horror, bringing his clipboard to his chest as if it was a hand over his heart, "Doctor Alexander, you should know better than that! You can't say the 'Q' word in the pit!"

Beth laughed at her superior's superstition; "Oh, come on, it's not as if it really does anything, like any second we're going to be flooded with trauma's or something, that's so unlikely-"

At that very moment the phone rang, and it wasn't the regular one either. It was the red one. The red phone was ringing. That only meant one thing: massive trauma. Cathy had picked up the phone, her face suddenly very serious, nodding and making agreeing sounds in all the right places. She puts the receiver down on the latch, looks up and presses the big black button on the wall next to the desk; an alarm sounds and the lights flash, she starts ordering nurses to take patients who need immediate medical assistance upstairs to a different wing and all other patients to transfer to other hospitals in the area. She turns to the two doctors, still stood next to the desk in confusion and tells them;

"We have a high priority and profile case; I was ordered to clear the floor and let only the senior residents and selected staff in."

"What else? Did they describe the patient's symptoms?" Asked O'Reilly, his face, searching.

"Not much else, just that it was an emergency if a very sensitive nature and they needed the floor and all qualified personnel, I don't think it was an EMT on the line either" Said Cathy, her eyes looking towards the entrance to the ER.

The next few minutes pass in a blur of confusion and panic, the assembled senior and junior residents standing in their yellow over-covers and surgical gloves in the brisk February air. In front of them stands Chief of Surgery Olivia Stanton, looking, as ever, well put together, if not a little bristled, the rush of the situation it seemed couldn't even be avoided by their strong and fearless leader.

"Right, everyone" she stated loudly over the sound of instrument carts and hospital beds being moved around hurriedly behind them, "I know about as much as you do at this point. All I know is that we have a high profile and priority patient coming into our ER who is about 2 minutes out. I do not know the name, status or condition of our patient, but this has come from the very top. I want to see your finest work people, if there's a problem, see me directly. Doctor O'Reilly will be taking point on this one, follow his lead and let's show whoever these people are just why NYP is the best hospital in this city" With that Stanton places herself at the front of the crowd of doctors, and everything goes silent, waiting for the roar of sirens in the early morning dimness.

It was as if the whole hospital was holding its breath and let it out again as suddenly the sirens cold be heard blaring down the street and the squeal of tires on the road as the Ambulance came to a halt in front of the ER doorway. Suddenly the back doors of the EMT truck were pushed open and a group of people, not only the paramedics jumped out, hovering over the still form of who could only be assumed to be their patient.

One of the EMT's started reeling off facts; "White male, approximately 30 years of age, multiple lacerations to the chest and abdomen, subdural bleeding, cracked or possibly broken ribs and a head injury. He's unresponsive. We had to bring him back twice on the way".

They managed to push past the two worried faces that came with their patent in the ambulance, getting him off the gurney and on to a bed. At face value, the guy looked fine, a little beaten up, but fine. He had a large gash to his right side that looked dark and sticky, definitely infected, along with dark patches of bruising all over his torso. His hands looked pretty knocked up too, gashes and scratches covered his knuckles and he had some deep lacerations to his forearms. His head injury was the main concern though. That was the kicker. The man looked peaceful, as if he were simply sleeping off a really bad fight, his olive skin shining under the surgical lights, and his light brown hair perfectly placed other than the matted clump where he obviously hit his head. Hard.

After inserting an IV and saline drip and taking his vitals, Beth suddenly started listening to the worried voices behind her, one of them sounding rather familiar. She turned around, and through all the commotion from nurses and doctors running around ordering medication, X-Rays and scans, was stopped dead in her tracks by the visage of non-other than…Tony Stark. Tony. Freaking. Stark. AKA Iron Man. Iron Man was stood in her ER, blood covering his probably million dollar suit, worry etched over his face. He turned to an equally distressed looking person, however, not quite as dishevelled as he, wearing a beautiful emerald green evening dress, her red hair still perfectly in place – Pepper Potts.

_'Oh my god! I have Tony Stark and Pepper Potts standing in my ER!'_ thought Beth, looking back at the injured man on the table, suddenly realizing that she should really be concerning herself with him rather than the company he was keeping. At this point Doctor O'Reilly grabbed her elbow, dragging her over to the couple who were deep in conversation. Glancing an obviously panicked look at the Trauma surgeon, he gave a supportive nod and parked them in front of the most famous power couple in the world.

"Mr Stark, Miss Potts, my name is Doctor O'Reilly, I'm head of the Trauma Unit here at NYP, and this here is Doctor Alexander, Senior Resident. I understand this must be a trying time for you right now, but we need to ask you a few questions about our patient, his medical files are no help, for some reason most of it is redacted, even his name. I understand that what we're dealing with here may be stepping of sensitive grounds, but in order to be able to treat him to the best of our ability we need to know as much as we can. What exactly happened to him?"

"Well…" started Mr Stark, "I can't tell you _exactly_ what happened to him, it's kind of a long story, but the jist of it is he poked the bear and the bear got angry and then the bear punched him through a wall." He finished, nodding his head as if everything he said had just made perfect sense.

The doctors looked at each other with a look of great confusion, when Pepper finally broke the awkward silence saying;

"He got into a situation he couldn't handle by himself and was beaten pretty badly. He works for…well, let's just say the Army, who loans him out for specialist Government work. He's the best at what he does, but all you need to know is that the entire time we've known him; he's never been injured like this. He usually just gets up, walks it off, but this time…he didn't get up. There's going to be a lot of things we can't tell you, not because we don't want to but because we can't and you'll need to work around that. Can you do that?" The redhead had tears in her eyes, her voice broken but hopeful as she stared at the two doctors in front of her.

"We'll do our best Miss Potts" said O'Reilly, placing a comforting hand on her shoulder, "Now, one last question, what's your friend's name?"

Tony Stark, who had obviously been deep in thought, staring over at the bed in which his friend lay still, getting even more tubes and wires placed on him, looked up, his face, for the first time Beth had seen it, hard and serious said:

"Steve. Stephen. His name is Captain Stephen Rogers."

Not that she knew it, but this was the first, and certainly not the last time Doctor Bethany Alexander would meet Captain America.


End file.
